With increases in quantities of content of which one owns or has access, the task of managing individual works becomes increasingly difficult. Up until a few years ago, only a few individuals had or had access to sufficient content to require tools to manage the content.
Soon after Edison invented recorded music using the gramophone to record sound on a cylinder, the rare few that owned a player had at most a few recordings or content. The development of the disk record in the early 1900s enabled mass production of music content, leading to individuals having dozens of music disks. In the early days, the disks were one-sided or two-sided spinning at 78 revolutions per minute and having one song on each side. It wasn't until the 40s that long-play disks began, revolving at 45 RPM or 33 RPM and delivering either two songs (one per side) from a small-format 45 RPM standard (singles) or a collection of around a dozen songs on a larger format (album) revolving at 33⅓ RPM. During this period, it was not uncommon for a person or family to own many dozen singles or albums. Management of this amount of content was easily performed by storing the content in boxes or on shelves.
In the mid-20th century, the video age began with the introduction of television. Movies, news, advertisements, cartoons, etc. were recorded on analog video tape and distributed to viewers over the air using a broadcast system. An early effort was made by RCA to provide content such as movies to individual homes using a video disk technology called videodisc, laserdisc or Capacitance Electronic Disc (CED) in 1964, but never became very popular due to size of the media and costs. Still, owners of such systems often had less than 100 movies at a cost of around $100 per movie. By the time RCA finally swung into production of CED players and content, it was too late because of the introduction of Betamax and VHS videocassette formats. These new cassette video tape systems had advantages over CED that included lower cost, smaller size and they enabled recording of content from the broadcast channels. Soon, people found themselves with hundreds of video cassettes, some with pre-recorded content and some that they recorded from television broadcasts. To organize these cassettes, furniture was developed that enabled the owners to store and view the titles of 50-100 video cassettes at a time.
During this same time period, alternate formats were developed for music as well, providing the audiophile with abilities to record music at home and, later, listen to recordings in their automobile or while out of the home. Home reel-to-reel tape players/recorders were available in the early 1950s, allowing mostly musicians to record their works at home. Smaller, lower cost systems came on the market and there was a small, ill-fated attempt to provide pre-recorded content on reel-to-reel format. Problems with exposed tape such as breakage and the required splicing, head cleaning, rewind time, etc, led to the eventual demise of this format.
To address the portability needs of, for example, automobiles, a new ¼″ tape format was developed using a continuous loop of tape in which the tape was pulled from the hub of the reel and replaced on the outer layer of the reel. This format, called 8-track tapes, was popular in the late 1960s, mostly for automotive use with a few players being integrated into home audio systems. The audio quality of this format was initially good, but the tapes often jammed or eventually wore due to being pulled from the hub during playback. Still, many owners built collections of many dozens of “albums” on 8-track tapes, keeping them in boxes or furniture in which the titles were easily viewed.
Soon, a new format to tape called cassettes supplanted the 8-track market. The cassette tapes were smaller, having ⅛″ tape instead of ¼″ for 8-track cassettes, but had 4 tracks of audio instead of 8 tracks, two tracks for playing in one direction, and then the cassette was reversed to play the other two tracks. Again, many owners built collections of many dozens of “albums” on cassette tapes, keeping them in boxes or furniture in which the titles were easily viewed.
In the early 1980s, a new format and technology emerged that would soon push aside vinyl records and all forms of tape. In 1983, the Compact Disc was made available to consumers. Unlike the prior media, the compact disc was digital (the analog music was encoded into digital values) and the CD had many advantages including sound quality, small size, easy handling, viable for portable and automotive use, resistance to heat (e.g. automotive) and lower in cost. The CD soon became the primary standard for music and vinyl records sales soon tanked. Now, because of low costs, smaller format and multiple uses (home and automobile), people found themselves with hundreds of CDs. Still, organization was by furniture or CD jackets.
In a similar way, the video cassette soon gave way to Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) and later, Blu-ray using the same size format as CD audio, providing high-definition video. People soon found themselves with hundreds of video discs, organizing in the same way as CDs were organized in jackets and furniture.
Soon after the introduction of the personal computer, many companies added sound reproduction to such systems. Initially, the sound reproduction was used as a notice or to create sound effects with video games, but it didn't take long for computer experts to find ways to store digitized music on hard drives of a computer. Likewise, as DVDs became prevalent, using some of the same compression techniques to store a full-length movie on a DVD disc, people found ways to store video on computer hard drives as well. In the early days, computer systems had 5-20 megabytes of hard disk storage storing only a few songs and/or movies, but as capacity grew and compression increased, these numbers grew quickly. By the early 2000s, it became common for a single user to have over 1000 individual songs or dozens of movies stored on a hard drive of their computer. By 2009, the typical computer system had around 500 gigabytes of storage (GB) capable of storing around 100 movies or 150,000 songs.
The digital content era brought about new content distribution models and new forms of content players. People started moving content from their CDs to hard drives of their computers. Content players were developed to reproduce digital content on-the-go (e.g. portable music players like IPOD). Digital content became available to home systems, automotive systems, televisions, etc. Music and video was made available over computer networks (e.g. the Internet) and people started getting content, one song or one video at a time, downloaded to their computers or devices through the Internet.
Additionally, services such as Napster and Netflix evolved to contain huge libraries of content and, after paying a monthly subscription fee, a subscriber has access to all content in these libraries until they unsubscribe.
Now, a typical media player has sufficient storage to hold thousands of songs and some home systems have storage sufficient to store many hundreds of movies. Access to services such as Napster and Netflix further increased the number of titles available to each user. This leads to organizational and management complexity. One can no longer look at titles on the edge of a CD jewel case or the side of a VHS cassette to find a song or movie that they the wish to listen or view. Being bits stored on a disk, the user no longer handles the content and no longer sees the media. There is no packaging and no printed labels. Now, the user must access the content through digital libraries and lists.
Organization tool were provided by software, an example of this is Mircrosoft's Media Player, providing lists of, for example, all songs stored on the user's computer and the ability to search for a song by title, writer, performer, etc. Many media players also provide organization tools, often with very limited user interface devices such as a small display and limited keyboard.
Often, users need a way to organize their content for various reasons. For one, at times, the user is in the mood for a certain type of music or music by a certain artist. For another, the user finds that it is easier to find content that is organized in a certain fashion such as by their own category, etc. Users have found that playlists are an important way to organize content. Many of these organization tools include the ability of creating playlists. In general, a playlist is a list of pointers to the individual content and is used to play a subset of the content available, to copy a subset of content to, for example, another device, to help locate a particular content, etc.
In the past, the playlist contained a list of pointers to songs which may all be in a folder or subdirectory on a storage device or contained on different local storage devices. Some newer devices have software supporting the DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance), allowing a first device to access multimedia content residing on multiple storage devices. When content is spread across different systems and services, the existing playlists are not capable of finding and tracking the desired content.
What is needed is a playlist that combines content that resides at various storage sites and multimedia content providers.